360° News

See current events from a 360° view.

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Inspiration

The current landscape of digital news and social media has both lowered attention spans and created echo chambers that limit our exposure to different views, further reinforcing existing biases.

Current text summarizers in the market are generally not geared towards news and do not place focus on expressing a wide range of angles. By providing small but informative paragraphs, our goal is to broaden perspectives on global events in an accessible manner for today's population.

What it does

  • You enter key words or explore a trending topic
  • We summarize 3 relevant articles from centre, left leaning, and right leaning sources, that have been posted in a similar time frame

How we built it

  • We use News API to collect matching news articles that fit key words from a range of politically diverse news sources
  • We use Cohere API to generate summaries of long articles into less than 100 words
  • Backend was built in Python and connected to our React frontend using Flask

Challenges we ran into

  • Setting up a server with Flask
  • Creating functionality of buttons on a JavaScript file to invoke a script in Python
  • Accurately generating summaries of large articles into the predictive NLP model using traditional training methods
  • API tokens and rate limits

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works 🥳

Also, each of our team members did something for the first time, like:

  • Completing a hackathon project
  • Learning to implement APIs
  • Using Flask with React
  • Not using a component library to build a frontend

What we learned

  • Got a lot more familiar with media publications, biases, and global news, especially top stories for this weekend
  • New technical skills :)
  • Also learned that one of our greatest strengths is asking for help (thank you mentors!!)

What's next for 360° News

  • Date range selection
  • More customization of news sources, such as filtering, browsing by categories, and setting a display amount
  • Email newsletter
  • Mobile app
  • Podcast
  • Improved performance

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